Google implements reverse geocoding
One of the main goals of the new version of Nulaz website, -which is going to be released very soon- is to provide a more user-friendly interface. Since we deal with a lot of geographical information, we thought that would be a good idea to link all our locations with their correspondent geographical addresses to make easier and provide different alternatives to find out where your friends or you favorite places are. We started to use a pretty shitty -and expensive- commercial API, so two weeks ago I started to toy with the sort of unofficial, custom-made javascript library. (http://nicogoeminne.googlepages.com/documentation.html). That method has a lot of fallbacks and it wasn’t easy at all to build a script that stores addresses in the database given lat/lng. The good part….well, it’s free, but I almost gave up trying to build something decent with that library.
Luckily, this friday just before the beers I found out that the great people behind the Google has released a new method on the Maps API that provides the same functionality as the geocode… but reverse!
http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2008/10/geocoding-in-reverse.html
So after a quite busy weekend I spent most part of this rainy Sunday afternoon coding and translating our previous reverse-geocoding system to the goodness of Google. I really missed those silent, lonely coding sessions. Coming soon to your screen! 
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